[MUD-Dev] Morphable worlds, Reset based systems revisited

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Matt Mihaly <the_logos at achaea.com> writes:
> On 26 Oct 2002, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

>>   1. the world becomes too big for socializing

> That makes all sorts of assumptions about game designs that aren't
> warranted I think.

Well, yes and no. I prefer smaller handcrafted worlds with a high
density of interesting and meaningful objects. I like the
intersection of travelling groups.

In a gameworld I love seeing two parties meeting each other,
cooperate to get rid of some enemies or obstacle, then go to
wherever they are heading.

> the rest generated) At the moment, 136 of those players are
> clustered together in the top four occupied areas of the game, all
> of which are player cities. Those cities generally have around
> 200-250 locations each. That's pretty good physical density,
> considering that I'm willing to bet those players aren't using 50%
> of their cities.

But then I suppose that adding new areas only caters for existing
players and not newbies?

My point is this: the first month of entering a world is the most
rewarding period. In a gameworld, I'd like to see that rewarding
period repeated. AO and EQ are currently not particularly
interesting for newbies, at least not for me.

In this thread I want to dwell upon the concept of reconfigured
relaunches, although you probably could come up with hybrids.

> Aside from physical density, every organization in the game has
> continent-wide communication channels, and there is also a
> continent-wide shout command, an area-wide yell command,
> continent-wide player-to-player tells, the market channel, and
> player-to-player persistent messages. The issue isn't whether you
> are going to be able to socialize, but how much socialization you
> want.

Mm... yes. Maybe. But I want socializing through interaction, not
spamming.

> My point is just the size of the world is only relevant to
> socializing if the designers choose to make it so.

Yes, that's true. Unfortunately, most MUDs have pisspoor
cityplanners, who aren't really capable of predicting what will and
what will not work (if they think about the layout in terms of it's
socializing ability at all). Certainly not plan for growth. Besides,
MMOs have a huge surge of newbies in the start, then the newbie
areas turn into ghost-towns....

> I thought you wanted a world, not a game? What does a level
> playing field have to do with a world? It also may put them off,
> but apparently not enough to prevent quite a few success stories
> in text and graphical MUDs.

Yes, in general I want a world and not really a game. :-) In this
thread am I talking about a gameworld (obviously). Of course, there
is no reason for why a world should not contain a relatively
independent gameworld...

--
Ola - http://folk.uio.no/olag/

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